I applied online. I interviewed at Boston Consulting Group in Jul 2017
Interview
Screen with recruiter. Massive take home technical case, followed by a video interview where I presented on the case (the interviewer was not especially familiar with the case). Was told I'd be proceeding. That was followed by a frantic attempt by BCG to schedule more interviews for me (including an in-person). I gave them availability, and then they stopped replying to my emails. A couple of weeks later I got a form rejection. That stung a bit--the take home case was about 8 hours of work, and to not get thanked for my time after they selected another candidate (I presume, given the job posting is gone).
The case is basically a Kaggle problem, except you're supposed to make a presentation for a mock client. The case is kind of silly -- it's a churn problem with standard modeling issues -- categorical data, missing values, noise, a poorly defined objective, a poor data dictionary, etc. The data appeared artificial, and modeled decently but only with non-linear techniques--it looked like they had created the data that way (there was a massive gap between performance of linear and non-linear models, far above what you would see in a real dataset). They also set some traps in the questions they asked you, where you really need to think about what's useful to the client rather than answering an academic problem.
I applied online. I interviewed at Boston Consulting Group (Los Angeles, CA) in Aug 2017
Interview
initial phone interview, followed by an 8 hour task to analyze a data set and report findings during the next webex interview.
The problem is that BCG does not respect your time during this process. First, the dataset provided had no 'solution'. They asked me to predict an outcome when the training data showed in every way that it was a randomly selected subset. Second, after providing a technical explanation of the work I did on the data set I was informed that they were simply testing me on presentation skills. I found that the interviewer is likely not interested in critical thinking or problem solving talent. Further, the interviewer refused to provide me with any insight into the data set I was tested with. That shows little respect for my time.
In short, don't waste your time unless you really want to work with these guys. I don't. I'll stick with real Science!
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Business knowledge and experience. Everything surrounded how well I would fit there line of thinking.
I applied through an employee referral. I interviewed at Boston Consulting Group (Boston, MA) in May 2017
Interview
I attended a school career fair and got contact information of an employee. So I asked him if he can refer me and he did. I got the first interview and it was an experience interview.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Describe a project that you have particular interests in, explain what you did and the results.